THE URGE TO PURGE

I have an eating disorder. So I have been skimming a rather mediocre book about bulimia.* It's something my mother picked up at the library for herself. She's resourcefulful like that, you know. As soon as someone in our extended family gets cancer (doesn't happen all the time, but I've seen it enough to notice a pattern), she whips out her 50 lb. medical dictionary and starts taking notes. Suddenly she is the household expert on brain tumors and Hodgkin's disease. Next thing, she's on the phone with key members of the aforementioned extended family engaging them in Cantonese-slash-English-medical-technical-jargon-speak. To the untrained ear it sounds a little something like this:

Blah, blah, blah, blah, Chemotherapy blah. Blah, blah, blah, Lymph Nodes. Blah, blah, blah blah, blah, CAT scan blah, blah, blah! Blah, blah, blah, ninety percent survival rate.

For real, she's like Henretta fucking Pussycat from Mister Rodger's Neighborhood of Make Believe! Meaow, meaow, meaow, frightened, meaow. Meaow, meaow, friend.

* Pg. 188 Eleven forty-five a.m., Day 53 "my body was working, my bowls were working. It felt so good for my bowels to be normal, I thanked the Lord." See what I mean? This doesn't really speak to me.